Featured Posts

This is an approximate rendering of my comments as part of the closing panel of “The End of Scientific Journal? Transformations in Publishing” held at the Royal Society, London on 27 November 2015. It should be read as a reconstruction of what I might have said rather than an accurate record. The day had focussed on historical accounts of “journals” as mediators of both professional and popular research communications. A note of the meeting will be published. Our panel was set the question of “will the journal still exist in ...

This post wasn’t on the original slate for the Political Economics of Publishing series but it seems apposite as the arguments and consequences of the Editorial Board of Lingua resigning en masse to form a new journal at the Open Library of Humanities continue to rumble on.
The resignation of the editorial board of Lingua from the (Elsevier owned) journal to form a new journal, that is intended to really be “the same journal” raises interesting issues of ownership and messaging. Perhaps even more deeply it raises questions of what the ...

In the first post in this series I identified a series of challenges in scholarly publishing while stepping through some of the processes that publishers undertake in the management of articles. A particular theme was the challenge of managing a heterogenous stream of articles and their associated heterogeneous formats and problems, in particular at a large scale. An immediate reaction many people have is that there must be technical solutions to many of these problems. In this post I will briefly outline some of the charateristics of possible solutions and ...